What I Did:

After I fixed the DVD drive and installed Ubuntu on this machine I discovered that the WiFi card was broken as it wouldn't register. I replaced that with one from a HP mini and let everything update. Three weeks after, it was too slow for me. Only 2GB of RAM was killing me so I nabbed another stick and tried swapping the processor. No luck with that but the RAM upgrade went fine. Next was the HDD, Kingston 300V 60GB SSD is the boot drive now. I got rid of the DVD drive all together and bought an adapter so I can keep the original 120GB drive for mass storage.

One install of windows 10 later and I'm looking at an almost brand new laptop. Apart from the faded and scratched paintwork. The final steps in this project were to remove the speakers, never used them, and to spray the casing black. Unfortunately, the primer I used had a poor hold in some places. Resulting in some faded patches. I decided that trying to fix them would probably make it worse anyway. Everything was working fine, until my BIOS calmed to be corrupted. happened out of the blue on day at college, when I restarted it was fine but had a password. Still haven't managed to get past this. Phoenix and Dell passwords don't work. I need an eeprom programmer to get it. Until then I have got by with access to the boot loader menu.

Today I took apart the machine and replaced the heat sink and fan. Used some of the MX2 paste for my GPU mods. Here are some images of the mod. This wasn't what I had hoped to add to the blog today but I had issues with the other build, I've had to shuffle my days around for the next two weeks. I'll put the plan at the bottom of the entry.

Whats Next?:

This Saturday I am in my office, building desks and worktops ready for the build coming Sunday. I will let out more details on this in Saturdays entries to this blog. I have so much stuff arriving next week that it might be hard to get big updates out for the Smokey Attempts blogs, not to say there won't be updates. I will have the summative GPU mod on the Drawer blog for next Sunday and big updates of the dedicated Red Mod blog next Friday and Saturday. As for other things, I have some old hardware that I'm going to be doing some mad stuff with. I'm planning some oil cooled stuff for next month so keep an eye out for that. Other that those things I will still be uploading snippets to this blog about random things like tiny heat sinks, buying experiences and what not.

Thank You :)